Pivoting quickly to enable customers to safely make purchases during COVID-related store closures

Context

• BOPIS (Buy Online, Pick Up In-Store) had been an ongoing initiative for over a year, but the project was never committed due to its complexity. However, it quickly became a top priority when revenue dropped sharply due to COVID-related store closures.
• I was brought in to guide the BOPIS user experience from proof of concept to launch, as previous designs had been rejected by executives.

My Role

Lead Designer I worked with and oversaw two other UX/UI designers. My responsibilities included establishing the overall design direction and ensuring the quality of the final execution.

Challenges

• Tight timeline: Only 3 months to launch. Executives had set a tight deadline without understanding the complexity of building a brand new feature that required new back-end capabilities.
• Business and technical stakeholders had strong assumptions about expected user behaviors without any research data to support them.
• Stakeholders were under a lot of pressure to build quickly and, in turn, put pressure on UX to deliver specifications as soon as possible.

Approach & Outcome

MVP

• Despite pressure to begin the hand-off immediately, I collaborated with Product and Engineering teams to implement a back-end architecture that enables a usable and cohesive user experience.
• I worked with Engineering to create an expedited hand-off process without compromising the design quality.

• With a successful partnership in place, I led the design team and helped launch our MVP in just 3 months.
• After establishing a solid user experience foundation for the MVP, I continued to lead UX design and research for fast-follows/backlog features.

Version 2

• V2 had a more ambitious scope as it involved expansion into the EU, which has differing legal requirements.
• Due to business complexity, the expansion project was put on hold before the refinement stage.